Minor Feelings Review

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 7/10

During a hike with Charlie and Catherine, I was asked what Minor Feelings was about. I couldn’t verbalize an answer. After a long string of “umm”s and “it’s like”s, I eventually forced out a vague description: “it’s an examination of being Asian in America”. That wasn’t wrong by any means, but it was facile. It isn’t really an examination, because that connotes some cold, detached perspective, which this wasn’t. It’s also not only about Asians in America; it’s about Asians outside of America, and other POC in America. I think that’s why it took my pea brain so long to conjure up this tiny sentence; I had never read anything that was similar to Minor Feelings, and I was trying to summarize a book that was entirely new to me.

I’m not saying that the topics Hong talks about are entirely new; anti-Asian sentiment is nothing new to me, and I (try to) read about the Asian American experience quite often. I think what was new to me was the bluntness she uses to expose the sordid position of Asians in America’s social hierarchy. For example, one of the first anecdotes she relates is about a south Asian man being exceedingly polite to a flight attendant. She wonders if his graciousness was genuine or borne from caution? I see this in my life also: Asians being super polite because it’s engrained in American society that Asians are docile and non-confrontational, so if we want to ask for something, we need to inquire with all niceties included in order to maintain that stereotype. Or is it because we are simply well-cultured and kind people? Is it even possible to form this dichotomy? (I think it’d be really interesting to examine how polite Asians are in Asia vs. America)

Another novelty for me was her hyperawareness of the white supremacist status quo. She says that as a writer, she’s been raised an educated to please white people, and that has been ingrained in her consciousness. She notes that telling her own racial story would play into white people’s desire to find the best “single story”, a trial by capitalism to find the minority story that resonates the most with America (read white people). Yet if she doesn’t write about race, then she essentially lops off the part of her writing identity that makes her unique — and white people win again. It seems like a lose-lose.

This leads into her definition of minor feelings, which “occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, ‘Things are so much better,’ while you think, Things are the same. You are told, ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure.”

The concept of minor feelings isn’t specific to Asian Americans, but she writes about how these feelings are amplified in Asian Americans because of their immigrant history. The Asians who immigrated to America were selected for their intelligence by the immigration laws of the 1960s. The “model minority”, the antagonistic feelings between Asians and other minorities, can all be traced back to this or generally some white person making a selfish decision. It’s also amplified because of the confluence of the American racial environment and Asian culture. Asians have a big culture of indebtedness. Hong writes that “being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own…If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering.” I think that’s true to some extent, but this topic is extremely nuanced. I agree with the general idea, but I also think there are also incongruences in this theory that have been paved over by Hong. It’s a little too simplistic.

Nevertheless, I think this was a good read. I give it 7 stars because Hong doesn’t really offer a “solution” to the Asian American peril in racial purgatory. Maybe I shouldn’t dock stars from her review because of this, because it’s a nastily difficult question to even ask, let alone answer. She ends the book by posing the question: “If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering?”

That’s a good question, Cathy, and I was hoping you’d answer it for me. But it’s an interesting thought experiment I’ll chew on for a couple hours before I start reading The Alchemist.